Flights on private jets, visits to nightclubs, and luxury-brand clothing are certainly attractive to a certain kind of conspicuous consumer. Rapper Lil Wayne (Dwayne Carter Jr.) is free to make such purchases on his own dime.

Those millions are harder to justify on taxpayer expense, however. Yet a recent Business Insider investigation discovered that the rapper took advantage of a Covid relief program to secure $8.9 million, which he spent on these and other dubious items, including, inter alia, “nearly $15,000 worth of flights and luxury hotel rooms for women whose connection to Lil Wayne’s touring operation was unclear, including a waitress at a Hooters-type restaurant and a porn actress.”

Carter is not the only musician who took advantage of this program. Other musicians, such as Chris Brown, Marshmello (Christopher Comstock), and members of Alice in Chains did as well, often simply pocketing the relief they received as, effectively, income for themselves. And they’re not the only prominent figures to have made questionable use of pandemic aid. Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul, made millions from their investment in a high-end California resort in the year that it benefited from aid intended for small businesses.

We’ve known for a while that the massive Covid relief bills were a massive opportunity for mischief. In October 2022, Brian Riedl surveyed some of the most outlandish examples — people using designated funds to purchase homes, cars, jewelry, and more — and estimated that “overall, waste, fraud, and overpayments may reach $320 billion of the $2 trillion disbursed from these key pandemic programs.”

Did wealthy musicians and well-connected politicians do anything illegal with their spurious uses of Covid relief money? Maybe not. But they still secured taxpayer largesse intended to help businesses and individuals get through the (often state-imposed) difficulties of the pandemic, while smaller and less well-connected enterprises and people genuinely suffered.